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There are 10 sorts of people, so the old programming joke goes: those who
understand binary and those who don’t. Now smug computer scientists are
going to have to expand the scope of the former category to include a
pre-industrialised Polynesian civilisation.

Long before the world’s financial centres traded wealth across continents
using ones and zeros, it seems that Pacific Islanders were doing likewise —
but with canoes rather than fibre-optic cables.

Researchers have found that before the arrival of Europeans, settlers on
Mangareva island developed a unique counting system that was a hybrid of
decimal and binary, using it to